Documentation and Websites Report November 2005

Documentation

Kylie has finished the first draft of a very comprehensive training guide for instructors.  The content covers our instructions to people who receive a Computerbank computer. Having a consistent training format helps ensure all the basics are covered in 3 hours.  In future all trainers will have to use this format.

Kylie updated the Front Desk guide.

Kylie and I are revamping the Individual Application kit for people applying for a Computerbank computer.

Websites

Computerbank's General website

http://vic.computerbank.com.au (Plone):

Shop items updated  - thanks Con
Shop layout revamped - Jan

There are 68 members of the Plone site.  We have 14 new members to the site  since the last report.  Membership to the site allows people to add to wikis and to add comments to other pages.  Additionally membership gives you some free web space.  You can add content in your "My Folder" and request it to be published.  I regularly check for requests.

Statistics for Computerbank's General Plone site:

Computerbank's Documentation site

http://doc.vic.computerbank.org.au (Silva):

Our documentation site has been upgraded from Silva version 1.1.2 to Silva version 1.4b1. Many thanks to our web hosts Obsidian for their work.  The upgrade was tricky, at one stage during the upgrade our instance kept crashing one of Obsidian's servers.  Not a good thing to happen to other people's sites.  Fortunately within hours Infrae (in Rotterdam) speedily isolated  the problem. For the curious there was a missing python script to the spellchecker causing the site to crash. Their clue - I reported the spellchecker didn't work on my test machine nor on the Obsidian server and seemed to crash the Zope instance when trying to spellcheck.

Kit Blake CEO of Infrae kindly helped me via IRC to add a page template and css for a print his page option to the site.

Question for next CBV meeting:
It is possible to make the internal documents available only to logged in members.  The internal documents are the documents located on the left hand navigation bar.
This would leave the documents for recipients the only publically viewable pages. CBV members merely have to log on to view.  This would mean members not already a member of the Silva site would have to apply to join the site via me.

Statistics for Computerbank's documentation site:

Silva Version 1.4b1 new features:

CSS W3C Compliant

All Silva CSS files now follow W3C recommendations.

Kupu Text Editor

• right hand sidebar with editing options refined with collapsible headings
  
• spell checking
  
• warning message if an author tries to leave Kupu without saving content.  The message asks if you wish to save before leaving the page.

Language Settings

Users can set their preferred language on the user settings page if the Placeless Translation Service has been installed.  This preference expires after 12 months.

Metadata Sets

Metadata sets can have a ‘category’ property.  This property can be used to define special purpose metadata sets.

Display in Table of Contents Option

In the Properties tab a box can be checked  to allow the content to be displayed or hidden in the Table of Contents.

User Interface Updates

• content workspace now has a sidebar displaying siblings of the item in the current folder.
  
• a publish now button has been added to almost all screens where a user may want to publish, including contents, preview, public preview, properties and its subscreens.
  
• users can close and publish (now) content in the contents screen.
  

WebDAV

Silva can now be accessed by a WebDAV Client.  An author can use their WebDAV connection to:

• browse the contents of the server
  
• retrieve contents
  
• creating new folders (MKDIR will create a Silva Folder, not a  publication, currently)
• move existing Silva objects
• copy existing Silva objects
• upload content of an unknown file type, the result will be a  Silva File object
• upload images, resulting in Silva Image types being added
• upload HTML, which should result in creation of a Silva Document
• uploading XML with a .slv extension, this should result in creation  of a Silva Document
• uploading HTML or Silva XML (.slv) to an existing Silva Document

However use the Silva interface directly to:

• lock content
• control versioning of content
• to set and retrieve metadata

Further information on using Zope and WebDAV with Dreamweaver and other editors is available from http://www.zope.org/Members/ike/dreamweaver/DAV